Alexa vs Google Analytics

Official Website: http://www.vaishnogsoftwares.com

Both Alexa and Google Analytics are used to analyze the traffic and the visitors of a website. You will find the You will find the percentage of visitors from different countries in the website.

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is softed, anonymized, counted and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. 

Most of the people who have just started to develop their own websites are very interested in its Alexa ranking. For those of you unfamiliar with how Alexa (AR) works. The lower is the ranking number, the better. It is supposed that the lower is the ranking number, the higher is the site traffic.

In the begining, I made a research about SEO and Alexa and if you make the same research you will conclude as well as that there are certain ways of "secrets" which can help you lower your Alexa rank.

Numbers could drive your crazy. But instead of watching the Alexa rank going up and down, you better search for the answers to your questions in Google Analytics. This is the best way to find out who, when, where, how and why visits your web site. Just like all products of Google the interface of Google Analytics is very simple so that everyone can be quick in uptake no matter if she/he is well grounded in SEO, traffic, visitors and keywords.

Here are some Important terms used for Alexa Traffic Rankings:

What is Traffic Rank?

The traffic rank is based on the three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measures of views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the web in a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the value derived from these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users). The three-month change is determined by comparing the site's current rank with its rank from three months ago. For example, on July 1, the three-month change would show the difference between the rank based on traffic during the first quarter of the year and the rank based on traffic during the second quarter. 

What are Page Views?

Page views measures the number of pages viewed by the site visitors. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the visitors of the site. The three-month change is determined by comparing a site's current reach with its values from three months ago.

What is Reach?

Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that of all global internet users measured by Alexa, 28% of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa's one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The three-month change is determined by comparing a site's current reach with its value from tree months ago.

How are TRAFFIC TREND GRAPHS calculated?

The trend graph shows you the site's daily traffic rank, charted over time. The daily traffic rank reflects the traffic to the site based on data for a single day. In contrast, the main traffic rank shown in the Alexa Toolbar and elsewhere in the service is calculated from three-months of aggregate traffic data.

Daily traffic ranking will sometimes benefit sites with sporadically high traffic, while the three-month traffic ranking benefits sites with consistent traffic over time. Since we feel that consistent traffic is better indication of a site's value, we've chosen to use the three-month traffic rank to represent the site's overall popularity. We use the daily traffic rank in the Trand graphs because it allows you to see short-term fluctuations in traffic much more clearly.

It is possible for a site's three-month traffic rank to be higher than any single rank shown in the Trend graph. On any given day there may be many sites that temporarily shoot up in the rankings. But if a site has consistent traffic performance, it may end up with the best ranking when the traffic data are aggregated into the three-months average. A good analogy is a four-day golf tournament, if a different player comes in first at each match, but you come in second at all four matches, you can end up winning the tournament. 

What are sites and Web hosts?

Traffic is computed for sites, which are typically defined at the the domain level. For example, the Web hosts www.msn.com, slate.com are all treated as part of the same site, because they all reside on the same domain, msn.com. An exception is blogs or personal home pages, which are treated seperately if they can be automatically identified as such from the URLs in question. Also, sites which are found to be serving the same content (mirrors) are generally counted together as the same site.

How does Alexa estimate website traffic?

One of those ways is to install the Alexa toolbar. The toolbar indicates only the traffic of people who have installed it in their browsers. Once someone installed it, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to Alexa's website where it is stored and analyzed.

This information is the basis for the company's web traffic reporting but other data sources beyond Alexa Toolbar are taken into account (I guess those could be domain name age, number of indexed pages in search engines, etc.). 

How does Google Analytic Work?

Google Analytics works with a 'page tag', a hidden snippet of JavaScript code (Google Analytics Tracking Code) that the user adds onto every page of his or her website. This code acts as a beacon, collecting private visitor data and sending it back to Google data collection servers for processing in almost real-time.

In addition, the GATC sets first party cookies on each visitor's computer. This is used to store information such as whether the visitor has been to the site before (new or returning visitor) and what was the referrer site or campaign the visitor came from e.g. search engine, email etc.

Why Google Analytics and Alexa are different

As you could read above, Google Analytics and Alexa use quite different systems to estimate website traffic, therefore it's not surprising if they obtain different results.

First, regarding Alexa, it's clear that the system has its limits: Alexa largely depends on the number of people using its toolbar. There can be some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base is of typical Internet behavior, notably for low-traffic sites. The largest is the community, the more accurate the data are. Unfortunately, Alexa doesn't provide information on the number of Alexa Toolbar active users (it could be something like several millions).

Second, concerning Google Analytics, the largest potential impact on data accuracy comes from users deleting or blocking cookies. Without cookies being set, Google Analytics cannot collect data. Plus, many ad filtering programs and extensions (such as Firefox's Adblock) can block the GATC. This prevents some users from being tracked, and leads to holes in the collected data.

Another limitation of Google Analytics for large websites is the use of sampling in the generation of many of its reports. To reduce the load on their servers and to provide users with a relatively quick response for their query, Google Analytics indeed limits reports to 200,000 randomly sampled visits at the profile level for its calculations.

As a conclusion, Google Analytics appears more accurate for small and medium-traffic websites than Alexa, but the latter can provide good estimations for websites having more traffic.

If you want to boost your business and promote sales include a well designed business website in your business plan, then contact us at vaishnogsoftwares@yahoo.in, shweta.vaishnog@yahoo.com or Call us - 87250-18881   or visit our Official website : http://www.vaishnogsoftwares.com

VaishnoG Softwares is working with you to bring new ideas to life in IT Market. Get in touch with VaishnoG Softwares by contacting by email at vaishnogsoftwares@yahoo.in or by phone at 87250-18881. For more information, please visit : https://www.vaishnogsoftwares.com/Articles/article2_googleVsAlexaRanking.aspx

Contact us: http://www.vaishnogsoftwares.com